"The USGA took what was already one of the hardest courses in the country and grew shin-high rough, which defending champion Johnny Miller said ranged from six to ten inches. “I like to measure U.S. Open rough by how far you’d be able to advance 100 balls if you hit into 100 different lies,” he noted in Golf Digest’s oral history of the 1974 U.S. Open. “Some recent courses haven’t had any rough to speak of. At Winged Foot in ’74, the average was 80 yards. All you did was hit wedge or sand wedge out.”
And the greens? Early on Friday morning, a car drove across the first green, leaving visible tire tracks in the dew. Once the grass was cut, there was no trace of any damage. Players could hear their approach shots hit the concrete-like greens from 175 yards away.
The conditions were reflected in the scoring: Hale Irwin’s seven-over-par total was the highest winning score by a champion in 40 years, earning the event the nickname “The Massacre at Winged Foot.” Both Irwin and Miller, along with many other competitors, called the setup the most brutal they had ever seen. Tom Weiskopf acerbically remarked that Miller’s record-low final round the previous year at Oakmont had motivated the USGA to fully expose Winged Foot’s fangs. “It was pretty obvious after 1973 that we were going to get the conditions we played under,” he said. “It was a typical knee-jerk reaction by the USGA.”
Not everyone hated the tough conditions. Jack Nicklaus reminisced fondly about the old days from the podium at The Memorial this week. Nicklaus has continually modified Muirfield Village Golf Club, a course he designed, to ensure it remains challenging. “I used to like the course setups the way the USGA did, with 25-yard fairways and three, four inches of rough, and then you had high rough,” Nicklaus said. “By gosh, there was no mistake; you either hit it in the fairway or you struggled. I liked that. I like greens where you’ve got to send the ball up in the air and bring it down like, as they say, a butterfly with sore feet. You’ve got to be able to play that way. That’s what I enjoyed. But you know why I enjoyed it? Because I could do it. When you could do something that somebody else couldn’t do, then you enjoy competing in that type of situation.” Read More......
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